It's so interesting to recall those days when we fight with green screen and write program in BASIC. It's simple but very systematic. I studied BASIC in my primary school. When I came to work in 1999, C++ and Java are already the main stream. But I do love BASIC - by facilitating it, I grasped the fundamentals of programming.

In 1970 I returned from the military, having never seen a computer, and got a job in a research lab at TI and the key activity was making a machine that that used laser light to measure the thickness of films on silicon slices. It was a mechanical and electronic marvel. It was operated by a HP computer that had 12K 12 bit words and ran basic for software. We spent an incredible amount or time trying to make the software smaller. It required 2 grown men to lift the rack mounted power supply and two men to lift the core memory box that had those 12K 12 bit words. My Android phone has more capabilities than that 6-ft tall rack that housed this system. In our spare time, we wrote programs for fun in BASIC. I am retired and have not written code in many years, but if I had to do that I would be tempted to try to use BASIC!.

Memory Lane is right! I learned assembler, Fortran and then BASIC in the '60s & '70s - first on mainframes and then minis. Picked up an Apple ][ and used Basic there too. When the IBM PC and networking came along, I developed an international business system which eventually was translated into many languages and implemented all over the world.

I have to chuckle a bit now looking back at the acronym since the language is anything but for beginners IMO. It has been extended and enhanced so extensively that there's not much that you can't do with it...

Over the course of my career, Basic enabled me to travel, live and work with people in over 60 countries all over the world. I shared dinner and drinks with presidents and CIOs of some of the biggest corporations in the world (Exxon, GE, Amazon, Arco, Mobil, Oracle, Schwab, etc.), had pizza with Egyptians overlooking the Nile, walked the streets of Moscow at midnight, feasted on pancake breakfasts during Calgary Stampede, drifted on the canals of Venice, sampled the tapas bars in Madrid, rode the cable car to dinner in Bogata, visited the Sydney Opera House, kicked a little sand in Bali, and experienced more than I ever would have guessed as a youth. All while implementing those systems...written in Basic.

In India, back in 1986, I was teaching some business executives about what computers can do and how they can be used to improve their business. Initially it was going to be just a slide presentation with material printed out from the IBM PC that we were using in the class. We had not planned on showing any hands on application in the 2-day class but I decided to develop a demonstration program as an after thought to show how easily someone could develop useful applications. Took me about 2 hours to knock out a simple program that simulated tracking cricket scores and displaying them in tabular format thanks to BASIC. What made it more interesting was the ease with which the execs with no prior computer knowledge could understand the BASIC program and suggest improvements and see the changes made on the fly with immediate results.

I first learned Fortran on a Univac mainframe and punch cards, and was exposed to BASIC on the TRS-80 Model 1. It was love at first byte. I can't even guess how many hours I spend in front of a screen-full of BASIC, squeezing out spaces and comments to fit just a litte more into the 4, and then 16, and finally 32K of RAM. I made money programming in BASIC from the late '70s until the mid 80s, and though I took up other languages, I still dabbled with it until VB came out.

Owing to my formative experience, I find object-oriented programming distasteful, and swore after fiddling with VB and C++ never to instantiate anything. I got out of programming (save a little shell and AWK) and so far, I'm a man of my word!

Joined the Navy, early 80's. I reported to an Admiral's Staff in Seattle. I was in charge of manpower billits for a five state area. (In the Navy Reserve, there had to be an open billet you would fill, in order to be paid) Once I understood the spreadsheets, I understood the system. A few weeks later a new program was presented to me. "Since you use computer programing, we want you to put all of our manpower data on the computer", ( I had three classes, including basic) I was walked to my new office(read closet) and was informed "here is everthing you need. When can we expect printed manpower listings?" My equipment was painted olive green and rust. I had a keyboard, printer, small table with phone(no dial) and one box of green stripe. When I picked up the phone, I was connectd to the "national programe" in New Orleans. The short version, was this was an experiment to see if a simple data capture system would work, though out the navy reserve. I was told to develope a basic program and be ready to send all the manpower info via a phone to N.O.. The system worked, but the dial up took 16 seconds per number/letter to transmit! I did visit each Naval Reserve Center in our five state area, with my portable modum in a briefcase. The experiment proved data could be gathered via a simple system and could be availble for time saving processing.

Earliest use of BASIC was Rocky Mountain Basic on a Tectronix 4051 with 700x1000 resolution in the Navy. but only 32K of ram. The screen was raster based and had to be flashed to remove or clear it. First program was for determining Biorythms, but eventually created a computer assisted drafting program that could draw really detailed ships drawings. The printer actually read the raster on the screen and flash printed to light sensitive paper. It was many years before anything with that level of graphics was available for home use. In the beginning character based graphics was as good as it got.

First home computer was a Sinclair before Timex bought them. And started real early with CP/M, the predecessor to MS-DOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS. I was involved with DOS since 1.0 and Windows since 1.0 on green screens because few had color monitors at the time.

I was 14 (1987) and re-coded a baseball card database from a produce inventory mgmt BASIC listing I found in Antic Magazine. It was great until I got to the 128K threshold of my Atari 130XE. After all db field and code optimizations, I was able to store 610 max of then current and retired players, their stats/profile, birthday, and which cards of theirs I owned and how many. It only took 5 minutes to install, and only 2 minutes to conduct a search!

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.